Posts in category: 1

Today’s post is written by CLN’s Senior Editor, L. David Sikes. Mr. Sikes is a businessman and former public company CEO, serving on several boards of start-up companies. He has a keen interest in left-of-center politics, and provides comedic insight and unique perspective to Center Left Nation.

SPRINGING OUT OF POVERTY by L. David Sikes

Newt Gingrich has come up with what I think is one of the greatest ideas to assist the poor and unemployed people of this country of ours. He has recently suggested that we should get rid of the safety-net for the poor and replace it with trampolines so they could spring into the middle class. Since the number of people living below the poverty line is historically the largest ever, in both number and percentage of population, we are going to need a lot of trampolines.

I am therefore announcing the formation of a new start-up company, The L. David Jumpers Co., Ltd., with the expressed plan to manufacture millions of trampolines right here in the U.S. of A. This will serve two purposes: one, to provide the necessary trampolines for the poor to escape poorism by springing into the middle class; and two, to revitalize the manufacturing base in our country.

Having spent the last 12 years of my life working with entrepreneurs and start-ups, I know a good thing when I see it. I will be raising money for this venture. If you would like to participate, I plan to raise $100M to build a manufacturing facility here on the coast just south of Half Moon Bay. This investment will provide you with a 10% stake in my $1B company. I am already working on the S-1 for our IPO which I expect to occur in the early part of 2013. Due to the overwhelming interest level from just close friends, please respond immediately if you want to invest, as we will be conducting a lottery to determine who gets in on this deal.

You gotta get in on this ONE!!!!

Soooo, low taxes for the wealthy on their capital gains, estate inheritance, and all that carried interest falderal, are supposed to be GOOD for our economy. Good, the already-wealthy tell us, because rich folks will INVEST all that money (that they save by not having to pay equivalent taxes as the rest of us) in the economy. And the result of this investment will be a boon for everyone because it will create JOBS!

You see, by cutting the already-wealthy a nice tax break they will invest that money in the country and the benefits will TRICKLE-DOWN to all of us.

THE DEAL: We Give The Rich Tax Breaks; They Will Create Jobs.

Again, soooo ~ How (explain this to me slowwwwly) did Mitt Romney’s money in Swiss bank accounts and in the Cayman Islands create jobs HERE?

GOSH, I’m so confused! Do the benefits to the country trickle out of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands? How does that work?

Did the 1% actually take their tax cut money OUT OF THE COUNTRY? Was that the bargain they struck with the rest of us?

DON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN!

Five of the existing and former GOP presidential candidates support policies that would make many forms of birth control illegal. Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Ron Paul have all signed on to the “Personhood Amendment” which would declare a fertilized egg, that has not implanted in the uterus, is a full person. Even Mitt Romney said in a Fox News interview with Mike Huckaby that he is in support of the “Personhood Amendment.”

Taken to its logical conclusion, every fertilized egg that does not implant in the uterus and is flushed from the body with the monthly cycle should have a funeral!

If such a policy were adopted it would make the pill and I.U.D. illegal, and perhaps many more popular forms of birth control would be unavailable to Americans. Birth control has been legal in the United States of America for close to a half-century, ever since the Supreme Court decided in 1965 that states do not have the right to ban birth control. In Griswold v. Connecticut, the U.S. Supreme Court reached a landmark decision that paved the way for recognition that birth control is basic health care for women.

The Left keeps telling the country that when the GOP says it wants “to take the country back,” that they really mean backward to what they see as the “Good Old Days”:

1) We could go back to the days of the Big Tycoons when the poor were destitute and children were forced to work to help pay the family bills. The GOP plans for the economy would make the growing inequality worse with their even deeper tax cuts for the already wealthy and the elimination of our social safety-net. And let’s not forget that Newt Gringrich has a plan to “eliminate the ridiculous child labor laws” (his words);

2) They revere the days when corporations worked their employees 7 days a week for low wages. The GOP historically has hated the minimum wage and is right now frantically union-busting across the nation in states that they control. Let’s not forget that it was the labor unions that brought us “the weekend” and safety on the job;

3) The GOP looks back to the good old days when corporations and Wall Street faced zero oversight, which drove our national economy into the Big Depression. The GOP presidential candidates are actually running for office advocating for financial deregulation. Not sure that anyone really thinks that it was a lack of financial regulations that caused our financial crisis;

4) And they reflect with nostalgia back to the days when women were kept in their place by eliminating the right to a safe and legal abortion. They all advocate for overturning Roe v. Wade and now they offer the last century idea of restricting access to birth control.

Barefoot and pregnant … here we go again! Let’s take our country back? Wow.

Thought we all needed a giggle this evening!

Maybe we ARE getting our message out!

The Bush tax cuts have devastated our national budget. Taxes have now fallen nearly 20 percent below the nation’s historical average. GOP Bruce Bartlett, from the Reagan administration, says “Taxes are ridiculously low, and yet the mantra of the Republican Party is ‘Tax cuts raise growth.’ So – where’s the f-ing growth?”

According to former Republican Senator Lincoln Chaffe, now Governor of Rhode Island, “The Republican Party went on a tax-cutting rampage and a spending spree!” He blames the two unfunded wars and the new Medicare prescription drug entitlement that was not paid for. “It tanked the economy.”

Economist Glenn Hubbard, an architect of the Bush tax cuts, says that there should have been a “revenue contribution” to the debt-ceiling deal, “structured to fall mainly on the well-to-do.”

Historically, Republicans have understood the importance of tax-hikes to balance the federal budget. “It was not a Democrat who led the effort in 1982 to undo about a third of the Reagan tax cuts,” recalls Robert Greenstein, president of the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “It was Bob Dole.”

Even Reagan embraced the tax hike, Stockman says, “because he believed that, at some point, you have to pay the bills.”

More and more Republicans from the Reagan/Bush administrations are coming out to say that the current GOP has gone off the deep end! The sad fact is: The GOP isn’t even rational anymore.

The Repubican party isn’t the party for our country, they’re the party for the 400 richest and the 1%.

The political parties are realigning once again. As the old Dixiecrat Democrats once left the Dems and moved to the GOP when the Civil Rights law was passed, and as the Black minority moved from its traditional Republican Party affiliation (that began under Republican President Lincoln) to the Democratic Party, we are now again seeing shifting political alliances in our country.

Today’s older and whiter generation continues to benefit greatly from the Democratic Party’s New Deal and Great Society programs like Social Security and Medicare. Yet, bizarrely they have shifted allegiance to the GOP, which advocates elimination of the very social safety-net programs that they depend on to keep them out of the grinding poverty that previously existed for the elderly!

The well educated are shifting from the GOP to the Democratic Party, as are many in the top income brackets, as well as the young Millennial Generation (under 30s) — all favoring a more just society than laissez faire capitalism offers. The new progressive coalition is made up of young people, Hispanics and African Americans, unmarried women, and affluent suburbanites.

Many blue collar workers, for decades aligned with the Democratic Party, are today moving toward the more traditional GOP in frustration with the economic crisis, fear of change, and fear of the country’s shifting racial demographics.

The Hispanic community, despite sharing traditional values with many in the GOP, is aligning with the Democratic Party, due to aggressive and hostile views expressed by many in the Republican Party which the Hispanic community sees as racial bigotry. The political results of the gathering minority strength is unknown, but exit poll and Census data predict that the Democratic Party will become “majority minority” soon after 2020.

So where does all this shifting leave us? Well, the Democratic Party is shaping up to be the party of minorities and the well-educated, while the GOP is now the party of corporations and less educated whites and the religious right.

There’s apparent conflict in the Republican Party: conflicting values and conflicting goals. The religious right and less educated whites have values in conflict with the corporate values of global capitalism and economic preferences for the upper classes.

Democrats seem to have more cohesive values and appear to be slowly moving national issues in their direction: Equal Rights for gays; Movement toward Universal Healthcare; Support for our Social Safteynet; and a national awakening about the impact of Economic Inequality.

So, how’s the political future shaping up for America? For the long run, it looks good for progressive ideas — for the short run … who knows?

So, take heart: even if the Democrats lose the next election, we’re winning on the issues — the progress may seem too incremental for most of us, but it’s happening!

Here’s the evidence. Since the 1960s corporate profits are at an all time high; wages are at an all time low; corporate taxes are at an all time low; and personal taxes are close to an all time low.

RECAP: Corporations are swimming in money, while wages are at rock bottom. And taxes are so low that our country struggles to pay our bills.

GOP SOLUTION: Why, of course their economic fix is to further lower taxs for corporations and the already wealthy — all the while straining our nation’s budget.

CLN CRITIQUE: With the business world sitting on piles of money and historically low taxes at this time, and our jobless rate at 9%, our assessment is that the GOP plan to revitalize the economy by giving corporations even more tax cuts is ludicrous.

With taxes currently at a 50 year low, and if low taxes created jobs — GOP: WHERE ARE THE JOBS?

The Republicans’ Super Committee Plan offers a whopping 0.5% in new taxes to help balance our federal budget! Wow … 1/2 of one percent. (See tiny sliver marked “Tax revenue” on the Republican proposal.)

Oh, and yeah … take a look at WHICH party has a larger debt reduction plan? Hmmm, there’s $1.06 Trillion MORE debt cutting in the Democrats’ proposal than in the “fiscally responsible GOP” plan.

xxx

Concentrated wealth in the hands of the few not only skews the economy and produces inequality, but it also undermines our democracy.

This concentrated wealth leads to overwhelming political power by influencing elections, setting legislative priorities, and pressing for judicial ruleings that favor corporations and the already wealthy. And all this concentrated political power by the few leads to the kind of economic machinations that caused the 2008 financial collapse.

In the 30 years prior to the collapse, the bottom 70 percent of the U.S. population experienced stagnant wages necessitating two wage earners per household in a struggle to maintain their middle class life. The top 1% — freed from essential regulations and any kind of oversight — engaged in reckless Wall Street speculation, which didn’t turn out to be so much of a risk afterall for them, because in the end they demanded and received bailouts.

The 1% is better off financially than they were in 2008, before the economic collapse … while the rest of us are screwed.

The answer we may all be able to agree on is a public funding system for our campaigns to stop the influence of big money in politics. The 1% is basically funding our political campaigns, and there is no other way to view that funding than as “the buying of influence.” The rest of us, the 99%, must not continue to accept that corruption of our democracy.

Extreme inequality concentrates political power in the hands of the few … the 1%.